In practice there are methods for slicing food products, e.g. sausage or cheese, wherein the products are cut into slices in order to be removed from a slicing area, for instance, in the form of shingled portions or stacked portions. Subsequently, the portions are packaged and delivered to supermarkets, which offer the portioned food product to their customers for consumption.
According to the law the packaged food product has to comply with a predetermined target weight, but at least has to be within a tolerance range.
Modern cutting devices allow the control of various parameters in order to obtain a desired slice cutting thickness during the production, which results in a target-weighted portion. In practice it is usually the case, however, that a food product fed to the cutting device is not completely cut up so that a remainder is left over. Such a remainder which could have been cut up as well, but does not make a portion with the target weight, reduces the yield.
Taking into account the aforementioned problem with respect to the remainder methods are these days used in practice which evaluate data about the geometry of the food product to be sliced before this food product is sliced, so as to partition the food product to be sliced into target-weighted portions in such a way that only a small remainder is left over.
The generic DE 101 31 701 A1 relates to a method for slicing food products that have a non-uniform inner structure, e.g. sausage or cheese, wherein the products are cut into slices, and particularly shingled portions or stacked portions are formed and removed from the slicing area. During the slicing, information about the contour and the structure of the product slices are obtained in successive detection processes by means of an optoelectric detection apparatus.
The information can be evaluated subsequently and be combined to obtain an overall information about both the contour and the structure of the product slices. Then, based on the obtained data about the contour and structure, certain operating parameters of the slicing machine, e.g. the thickness of the slices, can be varied during the slicing process, e.g. by controlling corresponding actuators, for instance, in order to keep the weight of slice portions to be formed by the cut slices constant within predefined limits. Although portions having the target weight can thus be reliably cut, the optoelectric detection apparatus is unable to prevent that a remainder is left over when the food product is sliced.